Fireball Seen Over US East Coast Likely Meteor - NASA

MOSCOW – The U.S. space agency said Saturday that numerous reports of flashes of light in the sky along the east coast of the United States appeared to be “a single meteor event,” according to news reports.

Bill Cooke, representative of NASA’s Meteoroid Environmental Office, told Associated Press that the flash “looks to be a fireball that moved roughly toward the southeast, going on visual reports.”

“Judging from the brightness, we’re dealing with something as bright as the full moon,” Cooke was quoted as saying.”The thing is probably a yard across,” he added.

The meteor had been widely seen on Friday night with hundreds of people sharing their eyewitness reports around social media.

USA Today reported that the flash was seen as far south as Florida and as far north as New England.

Robert Lunsford of the American Meteor Society told the newspaper that “it basically looked like a super bright shooting star.”

The organization has registered at least 353 reports about the fireball as of Saturday afternoon.

“My wife thought that I was crazy when I told her I saw something very bright fly across the sky while walking our dogs,” a user named John Kraly from New Jersey wrote in a comment on the society’s web site.

It is not clear whether any of the meteor’s pieces have landed.

Last month, a flaming meteorite streaked across the sky and slammed into Russia’s Urals territory with a massive boom that blew out windows, damaged thousands of buildings and left over 1,000 people injured.